WRITING SOUND

Earlier this year, I experimented with transcription and notation systems to see whether music writing could enhance my practice and/or understanding of the tradition. These writings did not have prescriptive purposes, since I privileged embodied learning, through imitation, body-part counting and audio recording. Rather, they were attempts to represent the music, which became instead tools to look at the relationship between the music, my own assumptions and those implied in the notation systems I used. The composition I worked on is Chanchal Chatur, a bandish in Raag Bhopali rendered in Khyāl. The composer is unknown; such is the case of many pieces which were composed, for instance, by pupils, to be gifted to their teacher. My first experiment with notation involved the use of a Romanised digital table based on the Bhatkhande notation system. This system was developed by Bhatkhande (1860-1936) as part of a nationalist project which aimed to systematize and democratize musical knowledge for easy access to the middle class, at the expenses of traditions of tawaifs (courtesan singers) and ustads (Bakhle, 1996; Subramanian, 2000). In the 1933 All-India conference, Bhatkhande stated: “I have tried to redeem our music from the hands of the illiterate artists whose method of teaching is unscientific, inasmuch as unsystematic, and consequently unappealing and unacceptable to the educated student” (Magriel, 2005:123). Yet, the sīna-basīna (‘breast to breast’) oral tradition of the ustads remains popular and highly regarded among students till this day.



The Bhatkhande system is a simplified notation of the skeleton of the composition, with emphasis on the relationship between matras (beats) and syllables. In my notation, this system is adapted to suit language and digital limits. It includes separated stahyi and antara, roman numbers to trace the beats, bold characters to highlight the sam (Sadhana, 2011). This system works well to visually represent the basic melodic structure and the importance of tal, but it is not suited for an analysis of ornamentations and other stylistic features, as the table would become crowded, and confusing.Another system I experimented with is transcription on the pentagram. At first, I was reluctant to include this methodology because of its history and the biases it carries, having been used by early ethnomusicologists to record ‘endangered’ non-western music in a process of racialisation of music. Stemming from social Darwinism, this trend assumed that non-western music with its rhythm and melody represented earlier stages of the ‘advanced’ western harmony (Moon 2010). The use of the pentagram to transcribe non-western music today still reifies the contraposition between the West and the rest, hiding implications of status behind claims of universalisation and accessibility. In the case of North Indian classical music, transcriptions took part in the history of colonial knowledge production: from the political interests of the East Indian Company in cross-cultural contacts to maintain a public “show of good relation” (Woodfield, 1994:201), to the collection of exotic Hindostannie airs by Sophia Plowden and the Oriental miscellany arranged by Bird (ibid.). Although these transcriptions might have raised interesting challenges and creative translations, using one’s own musical vocabulary to represent another’s inevitably carries not just errors and approximations, but in the case of the pentagram, even implications of status linked to the objectification of oral traditions, which also fostered early dichotomies between European popular and classical music. As much as no methodological tool can ‘faithfully’ represent music because of inherent subjectivity, it is necessary to look at the politics of ethnomusicology also in relation to ideological assumptions on structure, pitch, and musicality, hence heavy interpretation embedded in the tools used. In my rudimentary attempt, I found these fundamental differences: a) key signature, which I did not include and yet, it becomes implied in the notation, which fixates the melody even though I did not use Do as conventional Sa, but rather La# to show that Sa can be placed anywhere on the scale; b) the limitations of the equal tempered scale in representing microtones and movements that slide between notes; c) the linear timeline is not apt to represent the cyclical nature of the tal and its relationship to the lyrics’ syllables. Both writings do not give information on specific stylistic features and aesthetic qualities, and they make sense only to someone who is already familiar with the tradition. Yet, to my ustad, notation has no purpose, and it can even be distracting from in-corporation of music.

Who is it for then? According to Marian-Balasa (2005:6), one can never transcribe what they hear, but rather how the music sounds to their “culture-selecting and culture-embedded heart and mind”. Nettl (2015:75) adds that it is in the relationship between the outsider’s interpretation, i.e. transcription and the society’s understanding of the music, i.e., notation that the value of such analysis lies. Yet, such relationships are complicated by histories, identities and power
dynamics as shown above. Furthermore, none of the two systems represents how I, as anoutsider student, understand this music. Below is a short sample of my own way to notate this music.
This way of notating comes from visualising the sound in shapes, through voice movement, body gestures but also symbols and metaphors. For instance, in (1) I use a bigger and a smaller circles to visualise the rounded sound of R, when it touches on G and goes back connectedly; in (2) the small v between the two P represents going down without reaching the M and yet it is different from PP; (3) and (4) are for meend and gamak; in (5) there is _ for holding notes, the circles for rounded sounds and the ‘stairs’ symbol for briefly touching the notes during the glide. These shapes are not necessarily connected to pitch, but rather to how I visualise and/or imagine the quality of sound that I want to reproduce, which can be extra-musical too: for example, when I use the circle, I want my voice to be like honey on a wheel.
Of course, this is my own personal understanding and does not measure, analyse or share conventions, yet it opened the door for me to explore my relationship to music on my own terms.


SEEING SOUND

Further explorations of the relationship between sound and movement were inspired by the work of Clayton (2007) and Leante (2009) on gesture. The first looks at the participatory role of hand gestures and body language in Indian classical performances, with the aid of video recordings. The second studies how gesture can help understand the connection between sound and images in the musicians’ experiences of rag. With the aid of the medium I am most familiar with, photography, I recorded the movements of my hand while singing Chanchal Chatur. To trace the movement, I tied a small led light to my hand, and I shot four frames at long exposure (ISO 100/f 22).The resulting images correspond to (1) the slow alap (2) medium speed alap, (3) faster speed alap, and (4) bandish. In the images, there is a clear difference between the alap, which looks clearly delineated and the bandish, which has a smoky appearance instead; this is due to the fact that during the alap I meditate more on each note, while the bandish follows the fast tempo of the tabla. There are some similarities in how I use shapes in notation, such as circles in the first image and zig-zag motions in the third, however gestures do not necessarily represent voice movements: I might associate a note to a particular space or gesture because of muscle memory, but this is not a map of pitch. Instead, it is part of my embodied understanding of music, which involves personal and spontaneous expression and communication of the meanings of sound through the body. In this sense, it is closer to whatLeante (2009:187) calls “anaphone”, or the sonic, tactile or kinetic rendition of existing models, imagery, emotions. Gesture, in this case, mediates personal and cultural associations through the body, in relation to time and space. To me, these photographs tell me more about how I understand and construct extra-musical meanings of this music.






The translation of one embodied experience through different modes of expression, and in particular the visual media, had a great role in the representation of rags, especially at a time when no recording technology was available to extend the fleeting experiences of elitarian performances in the courts. Ragamala paintings were developed during this time to represent rag in a very culturally and time specific way, with references to kings and status, while also presenting a rich visual vocabulary for the expression of embodied emotions, which were represented as relational experiences, through elements of nature and sensorial perceptions.
Today, ragamalas do not have the same social function, yet testify how paintings and sculptures are rich sources of information about the music we cannot hear and its social contexts. In this sense, as Leante argues, ragamalas show how the aesthetics of North Indian classical music is “deeply rooted in cross-sensorial experience” (2009:185).Continuing experimenting with cross-sensorial experiences, I was inspired by Bri, a friend who is a synaesthetic artist, to try and paint the alap while listening to Kishori Amonkar’s rendition of rag Bhopali. I personally don’t have synaesthesia, so this was another attempt to understand the meanings I attach to the rendition of the rag, and in this case the improvisation process during the alap. I chose the ink because it resembles what Indian classical is for me: a new medium with an element of unpredictability, quite different from the control I have with oils, which is the medium I am used to. I used only one colour to represent the restricted palette of notes at disposal and different sizes of paper. These studies for me represent the balance I seek during improvisation between my own decisions and the flow of the rag; it shows me that one colour can create different scenarios and I would not be able to render the exact same scene twice. However, it also indicates similar patterns in shapes and weights across two or more studies, which represent recurring elements of personal renditions.

Lastly, I experimented with sound to express what alap represents for me. This is again part of exploring my own identity, positionality and personal relationship with this music. When I improvise during the alap, I think of vistar movements as waves of the ocean. This is an important part of my identity, since I grew up in a village in South Italy, where most social and economic activities, even religious ceremonies, revolved around the ocean. Hence, in this experiment, I combined recordings of the water taken in my hometown, with short alaps in Bhopali, which overlap to show how an alap can take different directions, just like the same water creates different landscapes everytime. Such for me are the possibilities of creativity.





BIBLIOGRAPHY

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